ical kind, which he somehow
renders intelligible even to the non-scientific reader. These are doubly
illuminative, casting spiritual light on the material world, and
strengthening with material fact the tenuous thoughts of the spiritual.
The words which he used of Shelley are, in this respect, applicable to
himself. "To Shelley's ethereal vision the most rarefied mental or
spiritual music traced its beautiful corresponding forms on the sand of
outward things."

His style and choice of words are an achievement in themselves, as
distinctive as those of Thomas Carlyle. They, and the attitude of mind
with which they are congruous, have already set a fashion in our poetry,
and some of its results are excellent. In _Rose and Vine_, and in other
poems of Mrs. Rachel Annand Taylor, we have the same blend of power and
beauty, the same wildness in the use of words, and the same languor and
strangeness as if we had entered some foreign and wonderfully coloured
world. In _Ignatius_ the style and diction are quite simple, ordinary,
and straightforward, but that biography is decidedly the least effective
of his works. It would seem that here as elsewhere among really great
writings the style is the natural and necessary expression of the
individual mind and imagination. The _Life of Shelley_, which is
certainly one of the masterpieces of English prose, has found for its
expression a style quite unique and distinctive, in which there are
constant reminders of other stylists, yet no imitation of any. The
poetry is drugged, and as we read his poems through in the order of
their publication, we feel the power of the poppy more and more. At last
the hand seems to lose its power and the will its control, though in
flashes of sheer flame the imagination shows wild and beautiful as ever.
His gorgeousness is beyond that of the Orient. The eccentric and
arresting words that constantly amaze the ear, bring with them a sense
of things occult yet dazzling, as if we were assisting at some mystic
rite, in a ritual which demanded language choice and strange.

Something of this may be due to narcotics, and to the depressing tragedy
of his life. More of it is due to Shelley, Keats, and Swinburne. But
these do not explain the style, nor the thoughts which clothed
themselves in it. Both style and thoughts are native to the man. What he
borrows he first makes his own, and thus establishes his right to
borrow--a right very rarely to be conceded. Much tha